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Russell thinks of knowledge in terms of justification, perhaps because that is also how the sceptic thinks, and this leads quite naturally to a foundationalist theory. Among the foundations Russell counts our knowledge of deductive and inductive methods of reasoning, of a priori connections between universals, and of the properties and relations of one’s present sense-data. In pursuit of the last, he came gradually to see that it is difficult to separate the sense-datum, as what is given, from the various interpretations that we ourselves add to it. He always did think of our sense-data as...

Russell thinks of knowledge in terms of justification, perhaps because that is also how the sceptic thinks, and this leads quite naturally to a foundationalist theory. Among the foundations Russell counts our knowledge of deductive and inductive methods of reasoning, of a priori connections between universals, and of the properties and relations of one’s present sense-data. In pursuit of the last, he came gradually to see that it is difficult to separate the sense-datum, as what is given, from the various interpretations that we ourselves add to it. He always did think of our sense-data as providing us with what he called ‘hard data’, though it is difficult to see any way in which our knowledge of our sense-data is somehow ‘more secure’ than our knowledge of physical objects.